Abstract
Historical films featuring female protagonists can offer a radical point of departure from the individualising discourses that buttress contemporary enactments of neoliberalism, such as postfeminist and postracial logics. This article analyses Amma Asante's 2013 film Belle through an intersectional framework, highlighting the film's Black feminist sensibility. Produced in a postfeminist context and located within the postfeminist historical women's film subgenre, however, Belle's radicality is simultaneously contained by the postfeminist and postracial logics that silence race and gender differences as significant spaces of marginalisation. This article, through examining protagonist Dido's relationships, thus considers how intersectionality, postfeminism and the postracial interact within the film to both produce and undermine a Black feminist approach to history.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 769-785 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | Gender and History |
Volume | 30 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Oct 2018 |